The present application relates to a tracking system for mobile assets, including an option to recover stolen assets, particularly for motor vehicles.
Motor vehicle theft is a significant problem in many parts of the world. Current vehicle tracking devices either make use of a “deep install” black box device that is physically fitted to the vehicle; they also include a wide-area wireless radio frequency (RF) interface such as a cellular radio or some other proprietary radio frequency system for the device to communicate via a communication network with computers that track the location of vehicles. The use of such a network increases the cost of operations of the asset tracking system.
In addition, prior solutions to the theft problem require a human (e.g., the vehicle's owner) to discover that the vehicle has been stolen, to then send a message to an operations center to report theft. Then, in response, the location of the stolen vehicle may be found using the location data periodically sent to a server under the control of the operations center, or sent in response to a query made to the black box in the car. This process may take several hours or even days because of the delay involved in a human discovering that the vehicle may have been stolen.
Moreover, in the field of insurance telematics, an insurer may wish to monitor driving behaviour of a vehicle with the owner's consent, in order to determine how a vehicle is being driven by a driver provide insurance discounts to good drivers and create incentives and programs for safer driving.
This present invention provides an improved asset tracking and theft recovery system that (1) does not mandate a wide-area wireless communication module on the tracking device inside a vehicle, (2) whether or not a wide-area wireless communication module is used on the tracking device, supports the ability to preemptively discover within a few minutes of movement that a vehicle is running without the presence of an authorized user of the vehicle (and hence may possibly be in the process of being stolen), and (3) as an option, embeds the ability to monitor the relevant driving behaviour elements required by the insurer without the need to attach the device to the vehicle harness.